by Adam Gopnik
We talked about cooking and restaurants. "There is an Anglo-Saxon contempt for French food and a love for it all the same," Jean-Pierre Quelin began. I tried, tactfully, to argue that while the top heights of French cuisine remain unique—Passard, Gagnaire—the everydays might be more pleasurable now in New York or even London. He was dubious about the second proposition but agreed about the first: They are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This, I think, is true. When I took my brother to L'Arpege for his birthday, we got fourteen [small] courses, mostly of vegetables—haricots verts with peaches and raw almonds dressed with basil and fresh mint; fresh shell beans with onion ravioli and tomato coulis—that made even the best of old cuisine look like sludge.)
We kept pouring the Madiran, and to my alarm, a second bottle followed the first. I saw the afternoons work disappearing. In voicing my own tentative criticisms of the state of French cooking—mild and commonplace—I realized that Quelin was completely insulated from the general opinion that the new Mediterranean synthesis that reigns in New York and London is simply the thing and that the French two-tier system—three stars for the millionaires and occasions; the same old same old forever elsewhere—is defunct. He just had never heard the idea. I didn't even try to convince him otherwise, though, not that I could.
Quelin's editor left and, the bottle still there, we began confiding—no, not confiding, engaging in that level of frank, let's-call-a-Medusa's-head-a-Medusa's-head honesty that is one of the pleasures of the end of a two-bottle lunch in Paris. We shared philosophical reflections on our sons, our lives, the impossibility of journalism. "The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages," he said, "the voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us." We talked about his time in the army in Algeria, when a Breton peasant under his command tried to rape a local girl. He stopped him, and the peasant drew his revolver: "I looked death, in all its absurdity and horror, right in the face for fifteen minutes." Then we talked about our sons. The day will come when they condescend to us, when they feel themselves to be our intellectual superiors, "and in that moment of pity we will find our pride."
It occurred to me then that the paradoxes that litter French writing are deeply felt among all French literary people. The pity and pride of paternity; the absurdity and profundity of death, the voluptuous cruelty of journalism—these antinomies are not affectations but part of a real heritage of feeling. They mean it. In my heart, I suppose, I don't believe that something can be horrible and beautiful; I am too American for that, though I suppose I believe that something can be voluptuous and cruel. A child of the occupation—his father escaped twice from prison camps, to see him as a baby—and the Algerian War, he knows in his blood that it is so, that life is damnably double, whichever way it falls. It may be an affectation, but it is not a pose.
Over the third bottle—a title for a French memoir—I tried out my pet theory: that France is marked by a struggle between its pompous official culture and its matchless vernacular, commonplace civilization—and that what makes France unique is that so much of the pompous, abstract, official culture has spilled over into the popular "culture," so that every man sees himself as an aphorist, his own Montaigne in his own tower. He pointed at me again. "That," he said dramatically, "is an idea of merit. You must write it up for us in the context of cuisine." I said that I would try.
When the bill came, he handed the waiter his carte bleu and was told, as I knew he would be, that they don't take cards. Without looking up again at the waiter, he reached into his wallet and handed him his Le Monde press card. "Send it to me," he said icily, meaning the bill. The insolence was enormous. Not even an essay at a smile. Afterward, as we left, he searched out the thin, intellectual owner of the restaurant, Michel, who had been giving us the same indulgent, fixed half-smile for three years and told him that he admired his navarin. Michel looked at him with hungry gratitude and then at me with disbelief—this one brought this one?—and I looked back at him in quiet, sneaker-bound triumph.
That Wednesday I appeared in Quelin's column in Le Monde, as a brave joyeusement americain who had introduced him to the bistro where they still know how to master the difficult art of the navarin, etc. Later on that year I even made a second appearance, at Quelin's invitation, and under my own byline, explaining my theory about civilization and culture in France and even making a terrible French pun on the words moss and mass.
Quelin never again made fun of the friends of the Balzar, so I feel that this diplomatic negotiation had, at least, been well conducted. At the end of the lunch, though, I wasn't just muzzy but absolutely knocked cold by the Madiran. I went back upstairs and slept for two hours.
And then it was over, all over by Christmas. One by one, the garcons each decided to take the "fat envelope" Bucher was offering them, and retire. They had to. There was nothing we could do. We walked into the Balzar one December evening, and everyone—Jean-Michel, Claude, Robert—was gone, gone for good. They had decided to take the fat envelope—just how fat it was I'm not sure, though it was said to be about a year's salary, in addition, of course, to their pensions—and go. Only two of the old garcons remained. We had lost.
Guy, who remained, spoke to me under his breath, sadly, as we shook hands, defeated. "A handful of cherries," he said softly. "They gave them a handful of cherries for a lifetime of work. What can I do? I want to work for a while longer."
I felt blue. Without the regular guys it was not the same place. They had an English menu now, and they forced it on me when they heard me speak in English to Luke. I told them to take it away and bring me the proper menu. The new garcon looked haughty and insulted.
I spoke to Lorenzo and Claude on the phone that week, and everyone agreed that this was the best thing for everyone: There was no sense in allowing the personnel to hang on waiting for some quixotic scheme for a new Balzar to hatch—though, they both added quickly, hatch it might, hatch it might. We rung off.
I stopped going to the Balzar. The food was fine, I was told, and I would still send visiting Americans there. But I no longer loved it, and without Jean-Pierre welcoming us, it was not the same place. Fortunately a good cookbook had appeared—by the American Daniel Young—with a couple of Balzar recipes that I liked, and I would stay home and make them for my family on Sundays: gigot d'agneau avec flageolets and profiteroles.
Then, one night at the beginning of May, I got a call from Claude. How was Madame and the heritier? Fine, fine, how was he? Oh, it was going for him. Listen, he said, the old guys had decided to come together for a night and give a dinner of their own for the people who had helped them in their fight. They would love to have us. Could we join them? Yes, of course, I said. We wouldn't miss it for the world. He gave me the date a couple of weeks off, at the end of May, and the address of a restaurant up in the Ninth, the Relais Beaujolais. The owner was a friend and was glad to be hosting the dinner.
By then Martha was already five months pregnant and very big, and it was a hot and humid night. It was a nice place, though, and we arrived at eight-thirty. There were two or three big tables set up, with familiar faces all around them. Everyone was there:
Claude and Guy and Lorenzo.... All the garcons of course were in plain clothes, jeans and short-sleeve shirts mostly. There was a lot of chilled Beaujolais and a dinner of piece de boeuf chasseur, roast beef in a mushroom-wine sauce.
The startling and instructive thing was that the garcons seemed, on the whole, happy, free, and content. They were genuinely philosophical, in the old-fashioned sense, about what had happened—meaning stoic but articulate. They could see their own situation against a broader background.
I sat across from Robert, one of the oldest of the old garcons, a small, mustached man in his late fifties. "A handful of cherries?" he said when I repeated, a little dolefully, Guy's comment. "Perhaps. But a handful of cherries is better than an empty hand." He was in a rust-colored short-sleeve shirt, and his mustache was
turning white. "Anyway, it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves—though only after the crisis is over. Still, that's enough lucidity for anyone. Anyway, it is all the lucidity that life will give you. The crucial thing is that it was our choice. We made it. We chose to leave. I'm rather old to do this. The younger fellows . . . but it's over, we made a good choice. And it was our choice."
We talked about more general subjects: Corsica, the Clinton affair. "We can't understand your society," he said, shaking his head, "at once so violent and so puritanical, so authoritarian and so anarchist." But of course, it turned out that he had someone, a son, in America, who was always inviting him over. He had been once and was going to go again. He liked it there.
"I love to study the problem of being," he added abruptly, and he told a long and tragic story about one of the other personnel, a maitre d' who had worked at the Balzar once, whose daughter, the light of his life, had committed suicide. Her father could not stop thinking of it and talking about it, all the time, his grief so deep, while he gave orders and cleaned tables. Though I knew him, in my callowness I had never sensed the tragedy of this man.
"His problem," Robert went on gravely, "was that he could not arrive at an abstraction of himself, only at a version of me, a me in some other form. He could not see himself as he was, see himself from outside himself. He was trapped in himself from the failure to make himself into an abstraction."
I looked up. Lorenzo was shaking hands and I could see was being urged to make a speech, a toast, but he was politely declining, smiling and shaking his head. La guerre est finie.
"That's a formidable guy," Robert said, nodding at Lorenzo. "Once he is wound up, ah, he can go on brilliantly, passionately. And Claude too. We were lucky to have them."
I thought the most irritating thing about life in France, as Ihad described it so sapiently to the readers of Le Monde—the insistence on the primacy of the unspecific, on turning things into abstractions of themselves at every turn—was a gift. The civilization I had praised, and the culture exasperated me, and by civilization, I had meant small shops, and by culture, big buildings. In the end, though, the small shops were special in Paris because they were always in the shadow of the big buildings. Take the small shops away (and the streets the shops sit on and the quartiers that the streets sit in) and you would have nothing—not Rene Clair or Trenet and Lartigue or the whole of this great and beautiful bourgeois civilization. But take away the big buildings, with their abstract ideas and grand manner, and the special quality of the Parisian shops—of the brasseries and cafes, of the glass houses and glass domes—their quality of being the stage sets of a modern drama, something more than just shops, would go too. The lucidity of Parisian empiricism was bought at the price of the grandiosity of Parisian abstraction, and you couldn't have one without the other, no matter how much you wanted to or how hard you tried.
We finished dinner, and I asked the owner—who had been up on a ladder most of the night, fussing with the single unworking fan that was supposed to cool off the entire salle—to call us a cab. My wife was large and easily tired. But just as the owner came to tell us that the cab had arrived, Claude at last rose and began to make a presentation to Lorenzo of a single immense, earthenware tray "A gift of friendship," he said, "of simple friendship."
Lorenzo Valentin rose to his feet reluctantly, hugged Claude, and began to sit down. "No, say something, say something," everyone said. He shook his head again. People began to pound the tables, as they had done at the Balzar a year ago. Now he was on his feet again, and I could see that he was about to begin.
It seemed like a good moment for us to slip away to the taxi, and we got up and tried to duck our heads down and go back up the stairs to the front room and the street. But Claude saw us going and cried out and called for a round of applause.
I stopped and turned and bowed. I had fallen in love all over again that night with the lucidity and intelligence of Parisian civilization, and I said, in my ornate, brutally accented, abstract French that we were leaving so precipitously simply to defend the health of one more child who would—that there would be a child who would be, to be born in Paris, and who would love Paris too—who would in some way be French. It was playing to the gallery, I suppose, but it got a round of applause, and I still tell myself they meant it.
We went out into the street, found the taxi waiting in the rain, and went home. From the street, as I helped Martha into the cab, I could hear the first murmur of Lorenzo's voice, rising in interrogation, just one last time, to inquire about the complexities of ownership, the love of a lieu, the hold of memory, and the meaning of possession, as it is felt both by the possessor and by the possessed.
***
I was so overtaken by the excitement of the strike and the action, and then I was so happily filled with a sense of moral indignation, and self-righteous pleasure, that I kept away from the Balzar, and for a while I didn't miss it at all. As generations of French revolutionaries have discovered, moral self-righteousness is a very good short-term substitute for pleasure, but it wears out. Now I realize that the Balzar still exists on the rue des Ecoles and that I have lost it for good, and I think about the light coming in on a spring night, and the way the waiters took the food from the oval platters to the circular plates, and the simple poulet roti, and how good it all was, and I miss it all the time.
Like a King
When we discovered that the child we were going to have in Paris last fall would be a girl—we already have a boy—everybody told us that we had been blessed with the choix du roi, the king's choice. "Why, it's the choix du roi!" the technician said as she looked at the sonogram, more or less in the tone of the host on Jeopardy! announcing the Daily Double. "It's the choix du roi!" said the woman in the two-hour photo place on the rue du Bac when we told her. "A little girl coming after a little boy?" said my friend Pascal, the philosopher, with evident pleasure. "Why, then, it's the choix du roi!"
Martha was delighted to be having a girl, however the king felt about it. She had always wanted a son and a daughter, and as she only now explained to me, one of the reasons she had been so eager to leave New York four years earlier, just after the birth of our son, was that all her friends there who had two children had two boys, and she was starting to believe that two boys were just one of the things that happened to women in New York, "like high-intensity step classes and vanilla Edensoy," as she put it. Also, she said, she was worried about having to succumb to the New York social law that compels you nowadays to name your sons exclusively after the men your grandfather used to take a shvitz with. In our New York circle of under-tens we already had, in addition to the requisite Maxes, a Harry, a Joe, a Sam, an Otto, and a Charlie—the whole senior staff of Benny's Market: Lowest Prices in Town. "Even if I had had another boy, at least in Paris I wouldn't have had to call him Moe," she explained.
I was pleased by the news too, of course, but a little mystified by the expression. To be brutally frank, what mystified me was why a king would choose to have any girls at all. If I were a king, I would want only boys, so that the succession would never be challenged by the sinister uncle with a mustache lurking behind my throne. Or only girls and an immortality pill. What puzzled me even more was the way the phrase, though you heard it on Parisian lips, had a slightly disconcerting air of peasants-in-the-spring ecstasy about it, the kind of thing ("C'est le choix du roil") you would expect to hear set to a Trenet tune and sung by the villagers in a Pagnol film when the baker's daughter gives birth to little Lisette.
I soon sensed, though, that while people meant it, they also didn't mean it, that it was a thing you said both as a joke and not as a joke. After four years in Paris I have come to realize that this is where the true cultural differences reside: not in those famous moments when you think that a joke was meant straight ("My goodness, the dessert grand-mere is not made by Grandmother!"), or you misunderstand something that was meant straight as a joke ("The tete de veau is actua
lly the head of a calf!"), but in those moments when you are confronted with something that is meant both as a joke and seriously. This zone of kidding overlaid with not kidding is one that we know at home. When a New Yorker passes out cigars in the office after the birth of his child, for instance, he is both making a joke about passing out cigars— with unspoken but quickly grasped reference to all the episodes of Bewitched and I Love Lucy in which Darrin or Desi or some other fifties-ish father passed out cigars—and sincerely celebrating the birth of his child. (The proof of this doubleness is that the cigars he passes out will actually be good to smoke, while mockery would make do with a bad or unsmokable cigar. Nobody tried to eat Warhol's soups.)
In Paris, the obstetricians all wear black. When your wife goes to be examined, the doctor who comes out into the waiting room is not a smart Jewish girl in a lab coat, as in New York, but a man with a day's growth of beard, who is wearing black jeans and a black silk shirt, like a character in a David Mamet play about Hollywood producers.
I first became aware of this when we went to get the first of many sonograms of the new baby. The sonogramist we had been sent to performs in a nineteenth-century apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement, with wainscoting and ceiling moldings and windows that open like doors. A curtain was drawn across one half of the living room, and couples sat on two sofas in the other half, turning the pages of Elle (Elle is a weekly in France) and waiting to be called.
After about ten minutes the curtain parted, and the sonogram specialist came into the room. He had on black jeans and a black silk shirt, open at the front and plunging down toward his navel, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A day-old growth of beard covered his face. He smiled at us and asked us to come in. We sat down in front of a handsome Louis XV desk—the sonogram equipment was over in the other corner of the office—and he asked us when the baby had been conceived. My wife gave him the likely date.